A modest proposal for helping

BY MY COUNT, there have been or are scheduled to be seven superstar concerts to raise money for the families of victims of the events of Sept. 11. There have been numberless dedications of profits from the sales of, or profits from the week of, and just plain checks written by American citizens.

I imagine we have all done it. Sympathy begets generosity; publicity creates cash.

Many of the victims were of course already insured; police and firefighters have good benefits, as is appropriate. Just last week, Cantor Fitzgerald, the bond-trading firm that lost 700 employees when the World Trade Center collapsed, announced an extensive benefits package, including profit-sharing, for the families of those who died.

Indeed, so much money has been collected from so many sources that it has created an infrastructure problem, as various agencies tussle politely over who will administer the money and what criteria will be used.

I do not suggest that a dollar of this has been misspent. I suggest, with the president, that we are now at war and that a large part of our war effort has to do with providing humanitarian aid to the victims of that war, and of the Taliban regime. Curiously and unusually, our duty as patriots and our duty as human beings coincide.

Airdrops of food may not be all that effective. For one thing, the Taliban has promised to burn any its soldiers find. For another, it is very hard to know whether the food actually gets to the people who need it. Boxes of food do not have expensive laser-guidance systems; they just fall out of the sky and land where they land.

ON THE OTHER hand: There are Afghan citizens in refugee camps in Pakistan and Iran. It is hard to get firm numbers; the lowest I have seen, from USAID, is 1.5 million actually in the camps. The United Nations says there are 5.5 million displaced people, 20 percent of them younger than 5.

And winter is coming on. Starvation approaches, and death by exposure, and predictable epidemics.

The one good thing about refugee camps is that food delivered there actually gets to people who need it -- unlike food dropped willy-nilly onto the plains of Afghanistan. It is a problem of unimaginable size, and it is a battle that cannot possibly be won in any definitive sense.

But still: 10 people fed is 10 people fed. A baby with a full stomach is a baby with a full stomach. Imagine if it were your child. Know for certain that it is someone's child.

We are now, irrevocably, citizens of the world. If we claim the right to pursue terrorists across international boundaries, surely we assume the burden of helping the victims of terror no matter what country they are found in.

I DID SOME poking around; it seems to me that the best bet is the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, which can be found at www.usaforunhcr.org for info and online donations. It has been on the scene for a long time, and it knows the problem areas. It is one of the agencies that benefit from those hokey UNICEF cans at Halloween, a tradition that may come back into fashion this year.

You can also donate by telephone at (800) 770-1100 or by mail: USA for UNHCR, 1775 K St. NW, Suite 290, Washington, D.C. 20006.

There's also the ever-reliable Doctors Without Borders, which is battling the diseases that come with malnutrition. It can be found at www.doctorswithoutborders.org. There is also a phone number, (888) 392-0392, and an address where checks would be welcome: Doctors Without Borders USA, P.O. Box 2247, New York, NY 10016-2247.

I urge you to clip this column and put it under your Hello Kitty refrigerator magnet or in some other prominent location, because this problem is not going away.